Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

This week in The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman writes about the recent scandal over Heidegger's antisemitism and reports on the recent discussion at the Goethe Institute between Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director of the Arendt Center; Babette Babich, Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University; and Peter Trawny, director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal. You can watch the discussion here. Trawny has just edited three volumes of Heidegger's Black Notebooks, philosophical notebooks Heidegger kept from 1931-1941. In these notebooks, Heidegger works out his ideas of what he calls a "spiritual National Socialism" which he distinguishes from a "vulgar National Socialism." Alongside these edited volumes, Trawny has published a slim companion volume, Heidegger and the Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy. In it, Trawny seeks to evaluate Heidegger's antisemitism and to ask to what extent that antisemitism contaminates Heidegger's philosophy. Rothman begins by recounting his own magical encounter with Heidegger's texts. "If I had to rate the best intellectual experiences of my life, choosing the two or three most profound-a tendentious task, but there you are-one of them would be reading Heidegger. I was in my late twenties, and struggling with a dissertation on the nature of consciousness (what it is, where it comes from, how it fits into the material world). This had turned out to be an impossible subject. Everything I read succeeded only by narrowing the world, imagining it to be either a material or a spiritual place-never both." For Roger Berkowitz's commentary on Heidegger's Black Notebooks, check out the Weekend Read.

Anka Muhlstein reviews Georges Prochnik's The Impossible Exile in the NY Review of Books, a chronicle of the life, exile, and death of Stefan Zweig. "On February 23, 1942, Stefan Zweig and his young wife committed suicide together in Petrópolis, Brazil. The following day, the Brazilian government held a state funeral, attended by President Getulio Vargas. The news spread rapidly around the world, and the couple's deaths were reported on the front page of The New York Times. Zweig had been one of the most renowned authors of his time, and his work had been translated into almost fifty languages. In the eyes of one of his friends, the novelist Irmgard Keun, 'He belonged to those that suffered but who would not and could not hate. And he was one of those noble Jewish types who, thinskinned and open to harm, lives in an immaculate glass world of the spirit and lacks the capacity themselves to do harm.' The suicide set off a surge of emotion and a variety of reactions. Thomas Mann, the unquestioned leader of German-language writers in exile, made no secret of his indignation at what he considered an act of cowardice. In a telegram to the New York daily PM, he certainly paid tribute to his fellow writer's talent, but he underscored the 'painful breach torn in the ranks of European literary emigrants by so regrettable a weakness.' He made his point even clearer in a letter to a writer friend: 'He should never have granted the Nazis this triumph, and had he had a more powerful hatred and contempt for them, he would never have done it.'" Thus does Mann give voice to the strange and human power of hatred not only for evil, but also for good.

Last week in the Boston Globe, Austin Sarat wrote of his research into botched executions: "Over the course of the last 125 years we have actively tried to find new ways to impose death without unnecessary pain, and to transform execution from dramatic spectacle to cool, bureaucratic operation. My research shows that we have fallen far short of attaining this aspiration." Two days later in Oklahoma--on the publication day of Sarat's new book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty--Clayton Lockett suffered one of the 7% of American lethal injections that go badly. Sarat writes, in The Guardian, that botched executions show that the dream of painless deaths is just that: "Over the course of the last century, while blotched executions have fueled movement from one execution method to another, they have not posed a serious challenge to the continuing viability of death as a punishment. In both law and popular culture, they have been dismissed as isolated accidents and aberrations, as symptoms of a system that is merely temporarily 'out of order', not irrevocably flawed."

In an interview, Nick Yee, a research scientist at video game developer Ubisoft and author of the new book The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us-And How They Don't, notes that, even given the fantastical possibilities the online games provide--fighting dragons, flying spaceships, even as something as banal as recreating yourself as a wealthy playboy or a famous celebrity--players tend to create online extensions of themselves rather than make an online persona that's wildly different than their offline one: "But what's surprising in 'Second Life' is it tends to be a really stereotypical version of suburban [life], like kind of Malibu, where everyone's shopping for Abercrombie & Fitch knockoffs and living in these very modern houses on the beachfront, that it becomes this hyper-materialistic version of the physical world.... Rather than allowing us to reinvent ourselves, virtual worlds tend to preserve the status quo and perpetuate it in powerful ways." What lies on the other side of this observation is the possibility that we could use social engineering in video games to affect change in the real world. As long as people continue to use virtual reality to escape their own lives, even if that escape, bizarrely, means by and large replicating those lives, they will prove resistant to being changed by what they encounter online.

Saim Saeed turns to Hannah Arendt to think about the declining impact of heroic actions in Pakistan: "But what good are heroes if they die alone, without consequence, without anyone remembering them? Their stories of extraordinary valour have hardly brought about the 'tipping point' many in this country anticipate to fight the many evils that plague us. Despite their own sacrifices to better the Pakistan they live and work in, society has not replied in kind." One reason, Saeed argues, comes from Arendt's insight that "action, in order to matter - to exist - needs to take place in the public domain. It needs to be perceived. And Arendt's own opinion is that action is mattering less and less. According to her, action is being reduced to a statistical aberration because the public sphere, in which action is to be perceived, is shrinking. Arendt has her own explanations for why that is, but for altogether different reasons, this trend is also true in Pakistan. Public places and institutions are being destroyed. Places of worship are being targeted. It is increasingly dangerous for people, especially minorities, to express their religious sentiments in public. The breakdown of law and order in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Karachi, Balochistan and other parts of the country do not even make it conducive for people to leave their homes. Even free expression online is being curbed. The PTA recently restricted access to QueerPK, one of the only websites facilitating an open forum for the queer community of Pakistan. Women are being raped on the streets. Journalists are being attacked. Girls' schools are being destroyed. People have been hounded in public parks.This has meant greater isolation. People are frightened into staying at home, have been blocked from accessing public forums online; their space to act is receding."

Amy Davidson, noting a poll that shows that 69% of Americans think that too many presidential candidates are coming from the same two families, wonders why it is that the consolidation of political capital hasn't received the same attention as the accretion of financial capital: "Why isn't all that investment yielding us any truly interesting products in the candidacy sector? It is as if our entire political portfolio were put into the same few stocks that had been there forever. Maybe it is money that, perversely or purposefully, stifles political entrepreneurship and innovation; maybe other factors are at work. In either case, the current situation can't be for the best, if it serves to make politics seem like a deadened realm rather than a place to bring and work out grievances. We are stretched out, paralyzed, in the polls. What hurts the most is that we may be suffering from a national failure of political imagination."

Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Mayer argue that "Twitter is entering its twilight." Observing that Twitter isn't the massive, and massively exciting, online hangout of days of yore, they have penned a eulogy for the service: "Twitter used to be a sort of surrogate newsroom/barroom where you could organize around ideas with people whose opinions you wanted to assess. Maybe you wouldn't agree with everybody, but that was part of the fun. But at some point Twitter narratives started to look the same. The crowd became predictable, and not in a good way. Too much of Twitter was cruel and petty and fake. Everything we know from experience about social publishing platforms-about any publishing platforms-is that they change. And it can be hard to track the interplay between design changes and behavioral ones. In other words, did Twitter change Twitter, or did we?"

Amir "Questlove" Thompson, writing about what hip hop is and what it is not, begins with "three famous quotes that haunt me and guide me though my days. The first is from John Bradford, the 16th-century English reformer. In prison for inciting a mob, Bradford saw a parade of prisoners on their way to being executed and said, 'There but for the grace of God go I.' (Actually, he said 'There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford,' but the switch to the pronoun makes it work for the rest of us.) The second comes from Albert Einstein, who disparagingly referred to quantum entanglement as 'spooky action at a distance.' And for the third, I go to Ice Cube, the chief lyricist of N.W.A., who delivered this manifesto in 'Gangsta Gangsta' back in 1988: 'Life ain't nothing but bitches and money.'" It is the first of six essays on "How Hip-Hop Failed Black America."

This week on the Hannah Arendt Center blog Kathleen Jones marks Holocaust Remembrance Day with a look at solemnity and laughter in her "Quote" of the Week. And Roger Berkowitz discusses Martin Heidegger and the Black Notebooks in the Weekend Read.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opusAmor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow Wyatt Mason explores the wild and wonderful world of super-artist Kehinde Wiley. "Wiley, as some of you may know, is an American artist, an unusually successful one. In the decade of his career to date, he's become one of the most sought-after painters in America. Holland Cotter, of The New York Times, called Wiley "a history painter, one of the best we have.... He creates history as much as he tells it." Even if you don't know him by name, you've likely glimpsed his grand portraits of hip-hop artists-LL, Ice-T, Biggie. Maybe you've even seen his massive portrait of the King of Pop: the one of MJ in full armor, astride a prancing warhorse. If all this suggests that Wiley, a 36-year-old gay African-American man, is court painter to the black celebretariat, that misconception has been useful to promoting his brand, up to a point."

Mason is skeptical, but if you don't know the Wiley brand, the route through Wiley's world of surfaces is about as fine a reflection as you'll find of the challenges facing the artist in a consumer society.

Zainab Al-Khawaja is sitting in a Bahrani prison reading Martin Luther King Jr. Al-Khawaja is a political prisoner. She is in a cell with 14 others, some murderers. To maintain her dignity and to announce her difference from common criminals, she has refused to wear an orange prison jumpsuit. As a punishment, she is denied family visits, including by her baby. She is now on hunger strike. "Prison administrators ask me why I am on hunger strike. I reply, "Because I want to see my baby." They respond, nonchalantly, "Obey and you will see her." But if I obey, my little Jude will not in fact be seeing her mother, but rather a broken version of her. I wrote to the prison administration that I refuse to wear the convicts' uniform because "no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice." (Thoreau)." Al-Khawaja's thoughts on dignity and non-violence are more than worthy testaments to her mentor.

Sara Horowitz takes on the "micro-gig," a new kind of freelancing that allows people to employ others for small tasks, like delivering or assembling IKEA furniture. Horowitz, however, worries about what "micro-gigging" might mean for workers: "It's as if we're eliminating the "extraneous" parts of a worker's day--like lunch or bathroom breaks--and paying only for the minutes someone is actually in front of the computer or engaged in a task." Welcome to our piece-work future.

Chloe Pantazi considers the work of the photographer Chim, also known as David Seymour, on the occasion of a showing of his work at the International Center of Photography. Pantazi focuses in particular on Chim's photos of children, saying that as he "offers up the every day lives of such adults working within the industry of war (as soldiers, munitions workers) we trust that Chim's postwar photographs of children yield something close to their every day, as vulnerable innocents who-like the newborn seen suckling at its mother's breast in a photograph taken of the crowd at a land reform meeting at the brink of the Civil War, in Spain, 1936-were virtually reared on the conflicts of their time."

Lucy McKeon explores Russian poet Kiril Medvedev, who has renounced the copyright to all of his works. McKeon recounts Medvedev's rebellion against the bourgeois idea of artist as private citizen-a type idealized by Joseph Brodsky in his 1987 Nobel Prize address. Medvedev is searching for a post-individualized and post-socialist culture-what he calls new humanism. "Logically, Medvedev's answer to individualized disconnectedness calls for a synthesis of twentieth-century leftist political and intellectual thought, a situation where several senses of the word 'humanism' begin to collide." Where something from poetry meets something from philosophy; where postmodernism, logocentrism, psychology, culture and counterculture, "and probably something else, too, that we haven't though of yet," writes Medevedev, join to form "a new shared understanding of humanity." Only in this utopian future society could the artist as private citizen responsibly exist and create."

Roger Berkowitz lauds the idea of early college. Jeffrey Jurgens considers Jeremy Walton's recent article "Confessional Pluralism and the Civil Society Effect." Cristiana Grigore responds to the recent New York Times article, "The Kings of Roma" by describing her own Roma upbringing in Romania. Kathleen B. Jones takes on New Materialism from an Arendtian point of view.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

As a regular faculty member for the Bard Prison Initiative, I can attest that one of the most appealing aspects of working with incarcerated students is their wide-ranging curiosity and perceptiveness. The men I know are eager to discuss topics that both deepen and expand the content of their classes, and they are quick to draw connections between their classes and current events. Their ability to make these links has a lot to do with the avid, even voracious attention many of them pay to the news on N.P.R., the major television networks, and almost any publication they can get their hands on. Such interest is a matter of both intellectual and existential significance: as a few of my students have related to me, the news offers one way to relieve their sense of isolation and to maintain a modicum of contact with “life in the street.” But their ability to draw connections also depends on an expansive moral and political imagination, one that consistently relates distant happenings to the details of their own lives.

A few weeks ago the students in “Migration and Diaspora in Global Perspective,” the class I am now teaching at Eastern New York Correctional Facility, wanted to know my thoughts on Palestine’s recent elevation to nonmember observer status at the U.N. The onslaught of questions began almost from the moment I entered the classroom. How would the vote change relations between Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority? Would the Palestinians be able to challenge Israel’s military incursions and settlement policies in ways that were not available to them before? Why did the U.S. oppose Palestine’s observer status when so many other states in the General Assembly favored it? How should we interpret Germany’s decision to abstain? And just how significant was this vote anyway? Was it a merely symbolic gesture, or would it have a real and decisive impact on the future?

I was not entirely surprised by the students’ interest, and I suspect that our class was responsible for at least a bit of it. Not long before, we had spent the day watching and discussing Cherien Dabis’s debut feature film Amreeka (2009), which traces the journey of a Palestinian mother and son from their home in Bethlehem to an Illinois suburb. The film’s U.S. distributor, National Geographic Entertainment, has marketed it as a classic immigration story, and the packaging for the DVD plays on well-worn themes of new arrivals’ disorientation, homesickness, and gradual adjustment. But the film also draws on Dabis’s own childhood memories in Omaha, Nebraska to cast an all-too-knowing eye on American life during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and two key scenes deftly portray the power dynamics that unfold daily at Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza. Beneath the anodyne surface, then, Amreeka packs a subversive punch, and my students appreciated its shrewd take on both the Israeli occupation and the U.S. War on Terror.

But my class is hardly the only reason why they are concerned about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A few of the students feel a degree of personal connection to ongoing events in the region because they were born and raised as Jews or because they converted later in life to Judaism or Islam. Others adopt a more distanced perspective but nevertheless regard the conflict as a pivotal geopolitical impasse about which they should, as informed students and citizens, have some knowledge.

And still others interpret the conflict as an almost paradigmatic instance of injustice, one that crystallizes the colonial legacies, entrenched political interests, and enduring economic disparities that define our contemporary world.

Moreover, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resonates strongly with many of the students’ own experiences of stigmatization and hyper-visibility on ethnic and racial grounds. In one way or another, virtually all of the African American and Latino students in my class—and they represent the overwhelming majority—can relate to the profiling, ID checks, body and vehicle searches, and policing of space that are an integral part of the Israeli occupation. Many of them can also sympathize with Palestinians’ more general condition of disenfranchisement, their desire for “a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective” (to invoke an evocative phrase from Hannah Arendt). In many instances, they cultivate such sympathy by drawing metaphorical links with their own histories and memories of exclusion.

On the basis of such connections, many of the students in my classes (and the Bard Prison Initiative more broadly) take a keen interest in struggles for cultural and political change in other parts of the world. They respond strongly to readings and films that deal not simply with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also with apartheid in South Africa and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. At the same time, they display considerable curiosity—and not a little generosity—toward other groups that adopt and re-work political traditions and cultural practices they typically claim as “their own.” For example, African American students are often struck by the ways that Northern Irish Catholics adopted elements of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and they display a good deal of appreciation for the manner that Palestinian youth take up the aesthetics of hip-hop for their own purposes today. They do not typically claim exclusive ownership over these cultural and political formations, and they do not condemn moments of cross-cultural appropriation as illegitimate poaching or theft (although, I must admit, it can take a moment to digest white Irish Catholics singing “We Shall Overcome”).

I welcomed the questions the students posed that day, and I worked hard to answer them as best I could. But I was also aware of the distinct challenge they posed to me as a teacher and fellow observer of the world. How could I convey my own understanding of the recent U.N. vote while also acknowledging the lingering uncertainties and disagreements that it inevitably reflected? How could I draw attention to the complexities of the current conflict and not merely confirm, in an uncritical way, the sympathy that most of the students already felt for the Palestinian cause? And how could I suggest that we should be thoughtful about the connections we draw between other people’s experiences and our own?

I, for one, am acutely aware that I cannot facilely equate my own societal positioning and life history with those of my students. Are there limits on the imaginative links we might forge with people in other times and places?

Our discussion that day barely scratched the surface of these larger issues. But I left it with a new appreciation for both the difficulty and the importance of this kind of candid conversation. As challenging as it might be, such exchange is significant precisely because it bridges the political and the personal, the distant and the close-at-hand.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.